Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - Like many fathers with teenage daughters, the time finally came for Abdel Mohsen Gifari to have an awkward talk.
The 44-year-old researcher for Saudi Arabia's feared religious police sat one of his girls down to discuss an uncomfortable topic: She wanted to drive.
In a country where women are barred from getting behind the wheel, his daughter's desire is not only forbidden, it's also a touchy subject for Gifari, who's spent nearly half his life working for the government body charged with enforcing the law.
"I told her that driving is allowed in Islam," Gifari said in a rare interview with a Western reporter. "But it is more of a cultural thing. We already have a lot of problems on the road when it comes to sexual harassment, with guys flirting with girls in the car. If a woman drives, it's only going to bring more problems."
Change is seeping slowly into Saudi Arabia, a Persian Gulf nation of 28 million residents - half of whom are under age 25 - and nowhere is the social friction more apparent than inside the religious police force that imposes the Kingdom's conservative interpretation of Islam.
Faced with increasing resistance to their intrusive policies, Gifari and the religious police are struggling to adapt.
Officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the religious police has hired outside marketing professionals to spruce up its image, publicly apologized for actions (such as detaining a Saudi man spotted kissing his wife in a mall parking lot), and visibly reduced its presence in some parts of the country.
The country's Shura Council, a predominantly male, 150-member advisory group appointed by the king, is even encouraging the religious police - an all-male domain - to hire women.
"If one does not adapt, one becomes extinct," said Gifari, a genial, bearded, bearish conservative who's taken on a newly created role as international spokesman for the commission, better known as al-Hey'a ("the Commission" in Arabic) or, more casually, muttaween ("the pious ones" in Arabic).
To survive, however, the religious police will have to do more than integrate women, said Ihsan Ali Bu-Hulaiga, a Saudi economist who just stepped down after 12 years on the Shura Council.
"They need to be more accommodating," Bu-Hulaiga said. "They might think in the religious police that women should cover their face, but it will not render her an infidel if she doesn't."
"In this society you need an adaptive religious police," he added. "The religious police can live with the time, understand the mentality of the people, the styles, the tastes, the choices. The orientation of people does change with time. That's a fact."
The push to transform the religious police is perhaps the most challenging reform effort for King Abdullah, the 85-year-old Saudi leader who faces resistance from influential conservatives within his government and family.
Since taking office in 2005, Abdullah's government has curtailed the ability of the religious police to interrogate suspects and scaled back their presence on the streets of Jiddah, the more laid-back Saudi city on the Red Sea.
The religious police also keep a lower profile in some high-end malls where single women feel relatively free to wear loosely fitting headscarves and shop alongside single men in stores.
"King Abdullah has done a lot and he's putting his reputation, and maybe even his life, on the line, especially with regards to the religious police," said Wajeha Haider, a women's rights activist who publically challenged the government last year by posting a video on YouTube of her driving in Saudi Arabia. "These people are like the Taliban."